Chilean guide ponders the perils of taking risks

SAN ANTONIO — SANTIAGO, Chile — Two days before flying to Patagonia to hike in the Andes, I met a Chilean here nice enough to ply me with pisco sours and discuss the joys and hazards of climbing up and down mountains.

Five years ago, Christian Steidle had led my travel companion through the same remote southern region of this South American country, but this would be my first time there. I came to start the new year in a new place, to seek an unspoiled destination away from home.

Steidle, 42, moved from Germany to Chile at 4. He climbed his first volcano, Villarrica, at 13. He works now at Patagonia Mountain Guides as an instructor and guide for climbers across the Americas; he also controls avalanches for the biggest copper mining company in the country.

Outside his home, we spoke in the crisp air of Chile in summertime, anticipating my trip south to Coihaique, the “land of eternal snow,” where Steidle lived for years.

I asked first about the avalanches.

“Instead of waiting for them to collapse above, we trigger them,” he said. “Avalanche, it's a huge animal. Once you get caught in one, you have to pray.”

Steidle has never been caught in one, he said, knocking on his wooden table at the prospect, but he's faced other hazards on mountains in Chile and beyond: in Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Canada.

These hazards, he said, fall into two categories: “objective and subjective.”

Anyone would recognize the former: They include ice and crevasses, lightning and fast-flowing rivers, steep terrain and slippery rocks; and peril comes suddenly: “The (time span) where people are OK to where they're suffering, it's quick,” Steidle said.

The latter occur in the mind: overconfidence, so-called “summit fever.”

“Ego is a huge one,” Steidle said. “You need to problem-solve the terrain.”

And solving problems on mountains can sometimes mean stopping and waiting to find a less perilous route. Not that Steidle avoids peril. He approaches it, but always with an awareness of the risks.

He once climbed the north face of Denali in Alaska, mounting a “knife's edge” of rock and snow, he said, for a mile. And he accomplished the first-ever ascent of Cerro Condor, the second-highest peak in the Castillo range in Patagonia, where his team spied eight condors at the summit.

“We named it,” Steidle said.

I asked: How could the second-highest peak in a range I was preparing to hike have been topped only recently?

“Because the mountains in Patagonia, there are so many peaks there,” Steidle said.

And what's the point, I asked, of climbing up and down mountains at all, anywhere, considering the risks?

Steidle looked at me for a moment, his eyes tired but alive, face weathered by sun. Then he recommended a book: “Conquistadors of the Useless.”

“It's because of this,” he said. “There's nothing more to talk about. It's that simple.”